The One Simple Reason Nobody Is Talking Realistically about Driverless Cars

None of the automakers expect to be selling you a go-anywhere autonomous vehicle anytime soon.

October 2017 By JEFF SABATINI Illustrations By JEFF XU

0shares

Researchers say that driverless vehicles, in order to be consumer-ready, need to be driven 11 billion miles in simulated or real-world settings. Let’s put that number into perspective: In the eight years that industry-leading Waymo (formerly the Google driverless-car program) has been testing automated vehicles, it says it has driven just 3 million miles on public roads. But the company also claims that it recorded a billion simulated miles in 2016 alone, so maybe the finish line isn’t so far away.

But what race, exactly, is it running? Are conventional car companies chasing Waymo, or are they in a different contest? Audi says its Level 3 system, Traffic Jam Pilot, will arrive with the 2019 A8, but whether we’ll see that technology in the U.S. remains to be seen. Daimler has promised driverless cars by 2020, Ford by 2021, and others have made their own, similar forecasts. But what gets under-reported in coverage of these pledges is that both Daimler and Ford are talking about producing fleets of ride-hailing cars rather than privately owned, go-anywhere vehicles. What about Tesla, a carmaker that acts more like a tech company and has a stock valuation that makes every automotive CEO jealous? It’s already selling “Full Self-Driving hardware” on its vehicles, but without the software, a practice for which it has been served a class-action lawsuit. There are more questions than answers here.

Paramount among them is this: If the driverless economy is imminent, and the endgame is fleets of fully utilized robot vehicles that create radical reductions in personal vehicle ownership, why would a car company be complicit in undermining its own market? The answer is that it wouldn’t. No car company actually expects the futuristic, crash-free utopia of streets packed with Level 5 driverless vehicles to trans­pire anytime soon, nor for decades. But they do want to be taken seriously by Wall Street as well as stir up the imaginations of a public increasingly disinterested in driving. And in the meantime, they hope to sell lots of vehicles with the latest sophisticated driver-assistance technology.